MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—November 15, 2007—
Sonics Inc., a premier supplier of system-on-chip (SoC) SMART
Interconnect(TM) solutions, announced today the general availability
of SonicsExpress(TM), a high-performance asynchronous bridge for
communicating between independent clock and voltage domains. In
addition, the company also announced new versions of SonicsMX and
SonicsLX SMART Interconnect solutions.

"Today power optimization drives most SoC development," said
Sonics CTO, Drew Wingard. "By implementing multiple voltage islands,
regions of the SoC can now be independently tuned in clock frequency
and voltage to reduce both leakage current and dynamic power. These
regions are naturally asynchronous to one another, which is why SoC
developers are introducing GALS on a broader scale."

Although most SoCs contain some asynchronous boundaries,
widespread application of GALS has been delayed due to latency, area
and design closure challenges. Furthermore, managing voltage domains
at the asynchronous boundaries has been largely ignored. Adopting
clockless or other asynchronous signaling techniques in SoC
architectures on a wide-scale basis also breaks stable EDA flows
because many EDA tools are not capable of verifying proper operation
for the asynchronous components. As a result, developers find it
difficult to reach timing closure and complete a project.

By employing the well-proven SonicsMX or SonicsLX SMART
Interconnect solution as the foundation SoC architecture and
connecting SonicsExpress to that foundation, SoC developers can
maintain architecture consistency and improve their competitive
advantages while utilizing standard EDA flows to complete their
projects. The packet-based data flow transaction optimizations made in
the new versions of SonicsMX and SonicsLX ensures SoC developers can
rapidly achieve high performance when employing SonicsExpress, and
also achieve power and area optimization.

In addition, SonicsExpress operates in the production-proven
SonicsStudio(TM) development environment, which provides both high
productivity in the architecture and design phases of the SoC. With
SonicsStudio, SoC developers can maintain an automated system-level
verification of the interconnected components as well as rapid design
iterations, higher design flexibility, and enhanced SoC quality.